Brokenness
by Pinkie Tuscadaro
Summary: Ashley's thoughts on Ellie and Craig and Paige and Jimmy.
1. Chapter 1

Sometimes I suppose I envied their brokenness. They could say, 'look at me, I'm functioning despite this,' Their this, whatever it was. Like Ellie, with her alcoholic mother and absent father and her cutting. She was something, a cutter. And Craig, of course, with his abusive father and dead parents and mental illness. Jimmy with his useless legs and trauma of the school shooting. Paige and her rape. This is what they had, the event to get over, to get beyond, to move away from. Not that I wanted any of those things to have happened to me. But nothing had and I didn't feel whole, either. But I had no excuses. Sometimes you just need an excuse. 'I'm sorry but I can't. Not today. I'm damaged,' They had something to focus on when they got bored, something to cower away from in their minds, something for their character to grow on. What did I have? Only mind numbing normalcy.

They got to have these extreme moments to submerse themselves in, and they could go as deep as they wanted to. Ellie could conjure up the image of her mother in a stupor on the couch surrounded by empty bottles of cheap vodka. Jimmy could hear the echo of the bullet in the hall, the sound bouncing off the lockers as he ran away. Craig could feel his father's fist connect with his body again and again. Paige could feel that extreme moment of penetration and her 'no', unheard even in the courtroom two years later.

What about me? Normal little Ashley, unharmed, untested. Could I go to school and take a science test after a beating? Could I go to art class and practice drawing figures in motion after being undone by one of my mother's drunken tirades, my arms covered in scabs and sores? Could I plan the entry of my band in a contest after being raped? Could I listen to my friends' problems after losing the functioning of the lower half of my body? I don't know that I could do these things. I didn't know how deep my reserves went.

Maybe all my trauma and troubles awaited me, when I would be able to deal with them, unlike my damaged friends. How well could Craig take his mother's death at 11? How old would I be when my mother died? In my thirties? Forties? Paige was raped before she ever had a healthy sexual relationship. If I'm raped someday by the mythical masked figure in the alley way holding a knife, hopefully I would have had years of healthy sexual functioning behind me, that I could fall back on. They were all too young for these things to have happened. Maybe older people can withstand such things. Of course I didn't know. I was only 16. Maybe things got worse as the years went by, everything lost its shiny newness, everything took on the sepia tones of boredom. Maybe the traumas pile up until you're a nervous screaming old lady in a nursing home.

I wanted a shiny tragedy to make me the center of attention, sometimes. Of course that thought is dark and nearly unthinkable. What would I do without my stable and loving parents? How could I function without their support? I saw how Craig and Ellie and even Jimmy functioned with their parents. Their abusive and neglectful parents, and I saw how they shied away from certain things like commitment.

And I guess we get back to it. Sometimes I longed for an excuse to crawl into myself, to not let anyone in. To say, 'no, leave me alone, I'm damaged, I'm broken, I need consideration because of this thing that happened to me,' When I was little I went to the University with my mom, and they had a war refugee there from Bosnia, a girl in a faded and worn wool sweater and she was brittle thin, like she hadn't eaten enough protein, like she'd lived on cabbages and roots during the war, and her neck was so slender, and a door slammed or a book dropped and she jumped. Sometimes I wanted to be like her, beautiful and cracked, like a chipped Ming vase, I wanted something I couldn't explain.

I wanted the same validity that Craig and Ellie had because they had suffered. Craig's dad beat him and that made him real. Ellie cut herself and that made her real. What made me real? What said I was here? I was loved and cherished, I was taken loving care of. No one drank when they should have been caring for me. No one threw me into walls and hit me with belts. No one shot at me down the long hallway. No one took all my yeses for granted and ignored the last no.

In this damaged world my health was a liability. Would I come to expect continued health and prosperity when that was unrealistic? At least Jimmy and Ellie and Paige and Craig knew what to expect. People hurt you. People went out of their way to hurt you. People would catch you up in their alcoholic insanity, their loss of the temper, their violence and brutality. People would cause you to become crippled in whatever fashion, physical or mental or both, and hobbled they'd send you back into the world with a better understanding of it. I had no understanding, I feared, but I glimpsed something terrible just over the horizon, something nameless eating all of our good air and gobbling the oil and scorching the trees. Something that blighted the crops and dulled the senses, something that couldn't be stopped, reasoned with, or even clearly seen. I felt a diffuse fear, and unlike my friends, I had nothing concrete to pin it on. I sometimes thought that if I had a tragedy I'd find one moment of relief.


	2. Chapter 2

Was I lucky? Lucky because nothing bad had ever happened to me? But the adjective there was starting to seem irrelevant. It was becoming simply-nothing had ever happened to me. I wanted to be taken down to the bone just once.

In Craig's eyes I could see him willing all the stuff that had happened to him away, there was always this manic nimbus of "I'm fine," even before the mania. How deep did his mental illness go? Was he born with it? Was it biding its time until it could explode?

Ellie accepted her experiences, snapped her rubber band proudly, survivor mentality. In her eyes it was, "I lived through this, I made it," She owned her past in a way Craig couldn't quite seem to do. And Jimmy wanted to deny it. Wanted to go back in time and change it. And Paige? Paige was going on despite of it. She'd make out with Spinner in his car no matter what emotions it stirred, because nothing could stop Paige.

They had their issues and their unique way of dealing with them. What did I have? Only questions and fears. Only the slight anxiety that things couldn't stay so good for so much longer, that sooner or later the other shoe would drop.

I couldn't help picking around their tragedies, just to see how they could cope. Just to see if that's how I would cope. Late at night with Craig I'd dare to bring something of his past up, regurgitated like some vile hairball. I'd ask about his mom and his eyes would slide to the side and he'd pull away. "What was it like?" I'd ask, and he couldn't explain. At the mall on a Saturday afternoon with Ellie I'd ask her how her mom was doing, and she'd shrug and say still drinking and she'd snap her rubber band into the thin translucent skin of her wrist. I'd ask Paige in a study hall how things were going with Spinner and her eyes would widen and she'd swallow hard and then she'd snap her "I'm handling it," face into place and say, "Great, hon, great," At the hospital with Jimmy there was no need to ask, it was all in his eyes.

And there I was, in all of their lives, and I wondered what they thought about me. Did my boyfriend envy my loving and supportive parents, my safe and soothing upbringing? Did my best friend wish her mom would nag her about homework and staying out late and would work on the rosebushes in the yard instead of shrieking at her on Parent's night and slapping her across the face and passing out again? Did they ever want to be me?

Even Toby has had things rougher than I have. His parents have a vicious relationship and they use him as a pawn in their war to destroy each other. Toby is brilliant but that brilliance isn't translating into any sort of popularity, and his one dorky friend was becoming cooler and drifting away, and then there was Rick.

I had no ransom to pay, not like they did. I was getting off scott free, and it didn't really make sense to me. It was all so silly anyway. Things like this shouldn't matter. I could experience things, good things, they didn't have to be so dark. Craig and Ellie and Paige and Jimmy were profoundly unlucky that those things happened to them. Sean told me about when Craig ran away in grade nine, he told me about talking to him on the phone and hearing his father yelling and pounding something in the background, and he told me how Craig tried to kill himself that day. Ellie had showed me her arms, the crisscrossing scars that would never go away. Paige told me how strong Dean was, how he wouldn't stop and she couldn't make him stop. And Jimmy. Jimmy. I was scared of the things that had happened to them.

I would be okay with myself and my own experiences. I would move forward and not yearn for something to make me feel real, achingly real. My angst was real, despite the fact that there was no concrete event to pin it on. It was my burden to filter my friends' experiences through the healthy mesh of my undamaged mind. My undamaged psyche. I was no Sybil with her 16 personalities howling in the mid-1950's psychiatrist's office, lamenting events from decades ago and struggling to put together the shattered pieces. That wasn't me at all.

I read books about these tragic figures, eating up their lives with my ravenous desire. I've read about prostitute drug addicts and multiple personalities and anorexics and rock stars before they made it big wallowing in heroin and tiny cockroach infested apartments, their cheeks sunken and their eyes hollow.


End file.
